


Isn't It Peculiar!

by ProtoNeoRomantic



Series: Patch Works [32]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Incest, Inconvenient truths, Infanticide, Other Women, Patriarchy, Patricide, Peculiar Institutions, Rape, Slavery, The Past Is Never Dead, What Doesn't Kill You Can Still Seriously Mess You Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 10:29:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2064651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zanya gives a bit of oral history.  Buffy, Giles and their relatives on both sides of the Atlantic struggle with the events and revelations surrounding their wedding reception.  Cordelia and her father try to out maneuver one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Isn't It Peculiar!

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Who Do You Think You Are?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235281) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



> Most of this material started out in "Chapter Twenty" of "Who Do You Think You Are?", but most of it will not make it into Chapter One of the next ATPFP book. But it's pretty good material and seems to mostly hang together around a theme, which is why I'm posting it here.
> 
> For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story Mechanics and Themes, see series description.

“ _Original sin. The notion that infants come into the world not innocent and clean but vile and corrupt, tainted with the guilt of every sin necessary to their existence and prone to repeat them. This is a concept I was born without in my benighted, heathen country. But it is such a small matter to be born again. All you have to do is believe. And if the proposition to be proved is that man is made to sin and to suffer, that he is a wretch deserving nothing better than hell, the crew of the Dama Fortuna made a compelling argument._

_No girl of eleven could have made the journey that I made and remained convinced of the basic goodness of humanity. The darkness that woke inside me, the hatred the spite the rage that were mine, felt as if they were an integral part of every fiber of my being, as if they had been there waiting all the time. For the first time, but not the last, I was born again. I had become a new creature....”_

 

Emma awoke. Because there was a hand in hers, presumably of someone who was glad that she awoke, she refrained from cursing aloud, but she was bitterly disappointed. She was alive. “Graham?” she whispered, trying to look at him, having trouble focusing. The hand stiffened. It was not Graham’s, but his father’s. “Where is Graham?” Emma demanded weakly.

“You’re in hospital, in the Critical Care Unit,” her husband deflected. “We weren’t sure you were going to make it.”

“Damn you, Oliver!” she rasped impatiently, “Where is my son?!”

Oliver let go of his wife’s hand. “Our son is dead,” he answered quietly. “Aaron is in jail,” he added, though he had not been asked about his grandson’s whereabouts. He was eager, Emma realized, to change the subject. “The police took him along with Robson, Steepleton and about a hundred others.” He had never been able to deal with anything emotional, not even as well as she. “Julian and young Mr. Morrison are there raising hell right now,” he blathered pointlessly, “I’m sure they’ll sort it all out….” Emma didn’t bother to listen or respond. She turned her face to the wall.

 

“ _My story, up to a point, is a fairly common one. Where that point is, you yourself may judge. I was born somewhere in the interior North West of Africa. My father was a proud man, high and mighty, wealthy and respected because of his father’s deeds more than his own. We had four walls and a roof and the optimism that comes from everything having worked out more or less okay for a fairly long period of time without our doing much about it._

_My father grew arrogant and greedy. He quarreled with neighbors over land and with traders over cattle. And when he bit off more than he could chew, he hired other men to fight his battles. They won, these mercenaries. They settled his quarrels with blood. But there was no one to take his part in his quarrel with them when they demanded more than he could pay. Their work was in blood and it was in blood that they took their wages. My father and brothers were killed. My mother, sisters and I were carried off and sold along with the cattle. Who took possession of the land we never knew. For a long time, I hoped it went to my father's worst enemy. That would have served him about right._

“ _By the time that evil ship landed in Virginia, I was no more a stranger to rape than the ‘virgin queen’ herself and I thought about as much of my father and of all mankind as she must have. It didn’t take me long to learn what I should think of women too. I got through a couple of years being kicked and slapped around kitchens and barnyards by them, a victim’s victim, trodden under the heals of the nearly powerless, but not quite nearly powerless enough._

_As I grew they hated me more and hurt me more because of it. For I was developing a power of which most women keenly feel their own lack. I was becoming beautiful. It was not my only gift. I was also smart. At times, I will confess, too smart for my own good….”_

 

At five o’clock, just as Joyce was thinking about closing up, wondering if Brian was ready to do the same, the phone rang. “Meet you at the car in five?” she asked cheerfully.

It was not Brian.

“Turn on CNN,” her grandfather advised. There was a tiny TV in a cabinet above Joyce’s desk. She joined their live continuous coverage of the “London Wedding Hostage Massacre” already in progress. The police were being criticized for their brutal mass arrest of the freed victims, apparently after the hostage takers had already fled. There was video of the half dressed bride fighting the police and demanding to see her husband (“who as it turns out really was very badly injured”) until the _second_ time one of them put a gun _directly_ to her head, when there were too many officers behind him with guns for her to escape by breaking his arm like she had the first one. In fact, she was one of only two arestees who had not been released and against whom the authorities were still considering charges. The other was the son of some scandalously important London bureaucrat.

The party goers described their attackers as anything from “a dozen armed Irish Republicans” to “a thousand shape shifting aliens” who had been heard to shout everything from Islamist and Marxist slogans to lines from Richard the Third and Henry the Fifth, but they all vouched for one another’s innocence. They needed a lot of vouching. There were a hundred and seventeen dead, including twenty-six police and hundreds more injured. In some way that the CNN team could neither understand nor explain, this was all connected to two earlier suspicious deaths, previously thought to be accidental, one of which Buffy had actually witness and the other of which occurred near the home of a witness to the first. The names involved, the last names at least, were all those of people that Rupert had mentioned as members of the Inner Council. Quentin Travers, at whose home the first ‘accident’ had occurred had apparently been shot to death by police while attempting to free the hostages, who included his son.

When Brian walked in, Joyce shushed him with a gesture. She was spared the need to explain when the cable news giant rolled the video of Buffy’s arrest again. The folks in the studio and on the scene had said everything new they had to say and were starting to repeat themselves. Joyce suggested to Wallace that she was going to hang up and try calling London. “Just keep watching.” Her grandfather advised.

Sure enough, within a very few minutes, they recapped their top stories of the hour, which included a manhunt in Arizona for an escaped Capital Murder suspect and his serial killer daughter, as well as the deaths of five and the arrests of three apparent mercenaries who had tried to seize the pair for an unknown player and had killed a third accomplice in the process. The bounty hunters (or whatever they were) had referred to themselves or their employer as “The Watcher’s Council of Britain” and to the girl as “The Slayer.” Brian did not interrupt the Arizona Manhunt piece by asking what it could possibly have to do with Buffy or how Joyce could sit and watch it while her daughter’s immediate circumstances remained so dire. He stood quietly and gave it his wrapped attention. Joyce didn’t comment on this very strange fact. But she noticed.

While CNN moved on to international news for a minute or two, Joyce dialed Andrew’s flat. No response. She left a message, though she didn’t see how he could fail to know that she wanted to get in touch with him, to find out what was happening to her daughter and to his son. Next she dialed information and tried all the Watchers’ names that she had heard until she found one with a listed number in London. “Adam is… out this evening” the woman on the other end of the line warbled nervously.

“Look, I know what your husband is involved in,” Joyce said impatiently. Brian pricked up his ears. Not shocked or puzzled, just… attentive. Joyce tried to ignore him. She identified herself as Buffy’s mother and demanded to be put in touch with her daughter or son-in-law right away. At last the woman gave her the numbers for the hospitals where she had heard that the victims were being taken. Two or three phone calls later she found herself speaking to a very shaken Peter Travers.

“Mr. Giles is still in surgery,” Peter lied as instructed. He could hardly allow her to speak to the man in his condition. “Buffy is still in police custody,” he added truthfully, “Though between our lawyers and the American consulate, we ought to have her out by morning.”

“What happened?” Joyce asked.

“Same as in Sunnydale, more or less,” he explained. “She killed enough of them in ones and twos that they decided to band together and make it a standup fight. It was more of a victory than not really, horrible as that may seem to say. We killed between a hundred and fifty and two hundred vampires on top of the sixty or so she’d already gotten, essentially the entire undead population of Britain and perhaps a quarter of the French.”

“And you lost your father,” Joyce said somberly.

Peter didn’t say that that might have been more of a victory than not under the circumstances too, though a numb, cold part of him thought so. “And a lot of other good and innocent people, most of whom never signed on for any of this,” he said instead. “My father loved being a Watcher,” he added truthfully, “I don’t believe there is anything else he would rather have died for.”

“No,” said Joyce, thinking of the hours she had spent sitting on her father’s lap, listening to him explain about the Cause of Freedom and the Menace of Communism, and of the moments when she had learned both that he would never be coming home and (much, much later) that he had been found in an alley in Phnom Penh with a bullet in the back of his head, “I suppose not.” She knew damned well how little a martyr’s piety did to soften the pain of losing a parent. She left him with all the words of encouragement she could muster and a plea to be the first informed of Buffy’s release or of any developments toward or impediments to that goal.

Brian was quiet on the way home. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. He unloaded boxes from his trunk and stacked them in Buffy’s room without asking then went back to go get more of his things from the tiny apartment above his shop. When he was gone, after she started dinner cooking as she fully expected him to expect, Joyce called her grandfather at the temporary number he had given her, a motel in Flagstaff. After filling him in on the latest from London and discussing contingency plans for a full scale Summers invasion of Britain, she said “I know you’re busy following up on this Faith person, trying to decide where she might have gone. But if you get a chance, I need a very deep background check on a man named Brian Arsenios.”

 

“ _It was not by accident that I caught the eye of a certain wealthy and not-all-that-old man who owned a great plantation bordering the middle-sized farm where I was a slave to a family who were little more than surfs themselves. Mr. Edwards was the only son of an old sea captain who had married only upon retirement, brought his young bride to America, poured the profits of a lifetime of trade and theft into land and slaves intending to plant tobacco, and promptly died._

_He was practically a prince and his mother, only recently dead herself, had spoiled him as thoroughly as any Roman Emperor. I pursued him like a fawn chasing after a lion. I knew I was nothing more to him than a tempting sweet, but I was my father’s daughter. I was arrogant. I thought I could turn pleasing this man into a comfortable living and best my tormenters in the bargain. But once again, I had failed to take proper heed of the deadly spite of not-quite-powerless women....”_

 

“Your principal called me today.” They were the first words Garrett Chase had said all evening. He said them calmly, conversationally, without looking up from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. Cordelia shrugged. Her features remained blandly composed, as if she were genuinely indifferent. She kept leafing through the latest issue of _Vogue_. “He said you left campus for lunch the last two days this week.” She less-than-shrugged in response to that. “I told you not to do that anymore,” her father reminded her, his tone just a bit harder, just a bit sharper.

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said without looking up. “It won’t happen again.” She sounded contrite and sincere. Which made it hard to say much back to her.

Garrett smiled grimly behind his paper, feeling an odd mixture of amused anger and ironic pride. She was his daughter after all. “Thank you, Sweetheart,” he said, with what sounded like fatherly affection. “You know I worry about you, that’s all.”

“I know,” Cordelia agreed, smiling up at him at last, tilting her head to one side. “That’s why I love you so much.” They sat together, in 'comfortable', 'affectionate' silence.

“Say!” Garrett enthused, twenty minutes later, as if the thought had struck him suddenly out of nowhere. “Why don’t you girls come to Portland with me? It will do your mother good to get out of the house for once.”

Cordelia beamed back at him. “That’s a great idea,” she lied. “I can hardly wait.” Just what she needed: to have to break her date with Xander. She made a mental note to email him as soon as she got to school on Monday, to warn him in plenty of time. She knew there were no computers at his house, and (though she could guess where he had emailed her from this morning by the fact that he was still driving Dr. Rosenberg's car) Sheila was bound to get impatient with his coming and going pretty soon, even if she was missing Willow.

But even if Cordelia had been sure of reaching Xander by email whenever she needed to, correspondence was a poor substitute for contact. The 'I love yous' and 'don't worries' they had sent each other today were a poor substitute for hugs and kisses of reassurance. And those they might now have to forgo indefinitely. All so she could spend forty-eight hours being held prisoner in a hotel room by her mother who would of course be ‘too tired to go out’ but ‘not up to being left alone.’

Cordelia felt a very slight twinge of nausea. Suddenly, her smile became a lot more genuine. She hugged her father to justify it. She would just have to be sick that day, that was all. Too sick to get on a plane, and then both her parents would be headed to Portland for the whole weekend. She would have room to breathe at last. And time to talk to Xander, really talk, in person, about everything.

Garrett smiled. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he said, sticking his nose back in his paper. He made a mental note to keep an even closer eye on his daughter in the two weeks between now and the trip to Portland, hoping he had created enough urgency for her to show her hand.

 

“ _Mr. Edwards, of course, had a wife. There was nothing unusual in that. She was a new wife, sent for rather than wooed, as alone as I and further from her home. When he bought me and brought me home, she became more isolated still, spending days at a time shut up in her room. She was jealous of me, and embarrassed by my presence in the house, which could not be explained in any polite terms._

_But there was nothing she could do about it. She could not have competed with me even if her pride would have allowed it. I was thirteen, ten years younger than my mistress, and Mr. Edwards preferred girls to women….”_

 

The dozen or so beleaguered survivors who disembarked from the London train in the hours before dawn were too numb with shock even to kill or feed. Even they had never seen such violence, such mass slaughter of their own kind. Harmony waited nervously to emerge from the shadows, to walk among them and play her part. She was not a good actress. She had told Spike that. Even as a vampire, she still got nervous every time she lied. She felt transparent. And she was.

“Oh no!” she assayed woodenly. “Oh, if only we had listened to Spike!” The actual veterans of the battle glared at her in tired, dull annoyance. “Who’s Spike you ask?” she prompted when no one did. “Why he is my very wise master who warned me not to go to London. I should have listened. I will go to him now in his lair in the Catacombs and beg his forgiveness and serve him the rest of my days, for he is a fair master and… and wise and will reward—”

“Qui est cet chienne stupide?” A very large vampire snarled.

“Listen you stupid cunt,” a pock marked little toady began to explain in one of those heavy somewhere-else-in-England accents Harmony had only ever heard in a few movies. “We know bloody well that you weren’t on the train with us, so what the hell are you playing at? We’ve waded through so much Goddamned dust tonight, I don’t think a fucking one of us would mind a little bit more.” His brothers in arms loomed behind him menacingly.

Harmony laughed nervously. “Look,” she pleaded with the stubby Englishman. “I have this boyfriend-master-sire-whatever, Spike. He’s really old and really smart at like plans and stuff and he has killed like a half a dozen Slayers, but he told me to leave this one alone and he was right. He sent me to ask if you guys want to work for him, but I guess I messed it up.” She gave them her best helpless, confused smile. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

The Englishman translated for the others. There was a little bit of arguing and muttering, then a general shrug. “Yeah, alright,” he said at last. “Take us to your master.”

Spike was still a very ugly sight, but most of his audience weren’t in much better shape, and he was standing strong on his own two feet which was more than could be said for some of them. “Under your old leaders, you just had your asses handed to you,” he declared matter-of-factly, listening carefully to the translation, which was close enough to suit him, as far as he could tell. From their reactions he gauged that none of the survivors had been a leader per se in the old order. Good.

“It was a fools errand,” he went on harshly, making a point of not mincing words, choosing his unvarnished truths very carefully. “The vampires of Paris were in no danger until you invited it upon yourselves. The Slayer will not come here. She would never have come here for anything short of an apocalypse! She has _business_ in London, with that ‘Council’ of hers, or she would never have left the Hellmouth. All that was needed was a little calm, a little patience. Now the vampires of this city have snuffed themselves like so many moths rushing at a candle. But that’s the _good_ news, mates.” They looked at one another uneasily. Spike's half suppressed smirk was exactly the expression he chose to make.

“On our own each of us could scavenge and survive,” he went on. “We could eek out an existence, crawling and hiding like rats, wrangling over scraps while we wait for new leaders to arise and enslave us.” He let them contemplate this possible future for a moment. “But together! Together we can take advantage of this wide open city! We can make it our own! We could be the leaders! But we have to start now! The sun is rising on a new and dangerous day. By tomorrow, news will have spread to all of France, all of Europe, all the world, that Paris is emptied of its old entrenched power structures and ripe for the taking! If we work this just right, people, _we_ could be the ones that everyone else has to pay tribute to take a bite out of it! Think about it. Who’s going to stop us!”

 

“ _I was pregnant before she was, though conception was her mission in life and something I was doing my very poor best to avoid. At any rate, it gave her an excuse to explain my function in the household. I was to be the wet nurse. If it had taken her another six or eight months to conceive we probably would have one day reached an uneasy alliance. But it did not, and the way she chose to handle the situation was the catalyst for our more-than-life-long war._

_When Tommy was born, she insisted that there could not possibly be enough milk in my breasts to feed two children. She had my three month old son taken from me and sent to a strange woman in a drafty cabin to be fed a flour based concoction that did not rise to anything approaching what is now called formula. Both of us knew full well that he would die, that this was her intention. Naturally, Mr. Edwards did not lift one finger to prevent the murder of his firstborn son. It would have been inconvenient....”_

 

“As of right now,” Morrison told Buffy grimly, “you are still being held without bond. Presumably, that will change when you’re arraigned on Monday morning. They’re charging you with battery against a couple of the officers. They’re felony charges but not enormously serious ones. If it wasn’t for the fact that you live abroad, I’d say we could plead you to probation in fairly short order and be done with it. As it is, we will have to let things cool down a bit and then see what pressure can be brought to bear to get the charges dismissed, but unfortunately that’s still going to involve… extending your visit to our fair island to some degree.”

Seconds passed. Then a minute. Buffy didn’t look up. Morrison had decided she wasn’t going to say anything. “Where is Giles?” she asked at last.

“Still in hospital,” Morrison answered. “They’re putting pins in his hips today I believe.” There was a heavy silence. “He’s still on painkillers, obviously,” Morrison said finally, not looking at her either, “so at least no one believes the things he’s saying, bodies buried in the garden etc.”

“What a relief,” Buffy said, “It’d be a shame for a bunch of important men to have to go to jail just for killing one lousy girl.” Despite the bitterness implicit in her words, her voice was completely flat. The closest thing to an emotion Morrison could read in her was ‘tired.’

“I understand—” he began, more or less apologetically.

“No,” Buffy answered bleakly, blankly, “You don’t.”

 

_“At first, when I nursed Tommy, there was someone with us all the time. I meant to kill him at the first clear opportunity, but we needed enough privacy to stage a scene that would fool Mr. Edwards. I was angry enough to kill, but not to die. Slowly, we were left alone more and more, but I kept putting off my revenge. For as much as I hated the mother, and the father too for that matter, I could not help but love the child._

_There was a hole in my heart that he mostly filled even if he didn’t quite fit. So for the rest of my natural life and long, long after, when it was love I needed, I always turned to Tommy and he to me. And quite by accident I found that I didn’t need to kill the child. By loving him I was revenged on them both….”_

 

“We buried Quentin today,” he said matter-of-factly. Emma did not look up. “Michael and Graham are both to be buried tomorrow.” No response. “I know you're already aware of that,” he went on. “Oliver told me that much.”

Emma turned to face him at last. “ _You_ talked to Oliver?” she said skeptically. Then, with a snort of derisive laughter, turning back to face the wall, “he must be getting truly desperate.”

“He is,” Andrew said casually. “He thinks you'll be dead in a week or two at the rate you're going.”

“And why would talking to you make me want to live?” Emma asked, sounding both worn out and annoyed.

“No reason I can think of,” Andrew admitted, his tone as cordial, as nearly indifferent as before, but somehow not quite as convincing. “But if you're going to die, it seems to me we have one or two things to talk about before you go.”

“What is there to say?” Emma asked the wall.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “that it's been so hard for you. I'm sorry for the things you've had to live with, because I do know what it's like, you know. And I'm sorry that you lost your son.” He did not apologize, Emma noticed for blackmailing her. Or Quentin.

“I don't suppose you'll be seeing much of Rupert anymore,” she observed coolly.

“Well I'd say that's my mess to sort out,” Andrew reminded her.

“What do you want from me?” Emma asked.

Andrew's words were blunt, his voice calm, not so much friendly as polite. “I want to know where my daughter is buried,” he said.

Emma smiled at the wall, an ugly little smile. “I suppose there are other people in the world who want that,” she replied.

“I suppose there are,” he agreed, “but I think we both know the complications involved in that. Anyway, it doesn't change anything between us, does it?”

“Quentin,” she said, changing the subject again, but sounding so pained, so genuinely needing to know, that he could hardly fault her for it, “was he... how did the funeral go?”

“Closed casket,” Andrew said grimly. “They shot him in the head you know. No one is letting on about Michael,” he added. “So at least he wasn't publicly disgraced. Patrick Bell gave the Eulogy, though he despised him of course. Made him out to be the newest saint in heaven.”

“In perfect Travers tradition then,” Emma said with a small bleak smile, “Canonized in public and damned behind closed doors.” There was silence for a moment. Andrew wondered if he should go. He was beginning to doubt this mission had a point of any kind. It was all so long ago. But as he searched Mrs. Dunstan's face, he caught a glimpse of Emma, hiding there, peaking out at him. So long ago and yet....

“Father took her,” Emma said at last. “He took her body away from me and told me to take a bath and go back to bed. I never asked him what he did with her. I tried to ask him then what he was going to do, but he just kept saying, 'Don't worry, it's alright.' Well it's been fifty-seven years and let me tell you, My Dear, it is not alright!”

 

_“Mr. Edwards continued to prefer girls to women, and so I might have expected to be supplanted in a few years. But both my mistress and I had daughters next, and when I became too old to interest him, they were not too young. As they grew older, others were born. My mistress, I believe, preferred this arrangement to having a succession of girls bought and sold down through the years. It was easier to hide and ignore, and she always cared more for appearances than the substance of things._

_And so, we settled in for our long war of attrition. Year after year we found new ways to hurt each other. Our children were our most powerful weapons, especially Tommy. He was all my solace and all her pride. We loved him as much as any two mothers ever could. This gave him great power over each of us, power which we both learned to manipulate to advantage one against another....”_

 

Court in England turned out to be a lot like court anywhere, ‘Whatever it is I didn’t do it, now what will it cost me to get out of here?’ Morrison wasn’t there. The Council meeting was going ahead as scheduled. He sent another lawyer from his office. Her bail was set at £200,000, cash. That wasn’t a problem. It was waiting for her when she got back to the jail. She didn’t know if it had come from Andrew or one of the others. Or from all of them together, from the treasury of the Council itself or one of it’s shell corporations. It didn’t matter. They were all one thing as far as Buffy was concerned. She had to surrender her passport into the keeping of the American Consulate. That didn’t matter either. There was only one place Buffy wanted to go, one person she wanted to see.

“Buffy,” Giles whispered, easing himself up just a little against his pillows, his voice small and weak, but warm with affection, relief and pleasant surprise. “My God, you are a beautiful sight!”

Buffy ran an embarrassed hand through her sort-of-combed hair and squirmed a little inside the shapeless, ill-fitting clothes Morrison’s friend had brought for her to be released in. “So I see the spell _has_ worn off,” she said with a wan smile, “That must be a relief.” She tried to mean that last part as a joke but suddenly found that she was not smiling. The look on Giles’ face told her it had sounded as harsh as she was afraid it might have.

A mutually glum and guilty silence crept between them. “How’s your pelvis?” Buffy asked quietly after a while.

An ironic smile flashed across Giles’ face. “Out of commission, I’m afraid,” he said somehow both regretfully and suggestively, “so I do hope you will be patient with me in that regard.”

“Oh, yeah,” Buffy teased, rolling her eyes, unable to suppress a grin, “ _That’s_ what I meant(!)”

“All of their plans for wiring me back together appear to have succeeded,” he explained a tad more seriously. “They want to keep me here another four or five days to mend, then send me—I quote—'home' for about four weeks before moving me to a rehabilitation facility for another four weeks of intensive physical and occupational therapy, which we will be paying through the nose for incidentally, since I’ve lived abroad about three days too long to qualify for National Insurance. All just a huge pain in the ass really. By the end of the summer I should be right as… I should be alright.”

Buffy sighed. “It is what it is,” she half agreed. “They just set me a trial date for July20th, which, that lawyer friend of Morrison’s told me might get pushed back two or three times before anything gets done one way or the other, so I guess we are stuck here for a while, regardless. We just have to take it one day at a time.

“The only thing that worries me is…”

“Who’s minding the Hellmouth?” Giles concluded grimly.

“Exactly,” Buffy agreed. “I mean, with there not being another Slayer called to replace Kendra…” Giles shifted uncomfortably, then grimaced in pain. “Can I do anything?” Buffy asked worriedly. He shook his head.

“I’ll be alright,” he assured her as soon as he could speak again. “It’s only an hour until my next dose of really excellent narcotics.” A few more minutes passed. They kept each other company, talking about things that didn’t matter. But it was getting on towards lunch time, which for Giles would be followed by medication and a nap. Things that did matter had to be talked about.

 

_ “I bore Mr. Edwards’ last child at twenty-two, and Tommy’s first at twenty-eight. Like Tommy, I loved Celia poignantly though I could see my mistress in her. Of all my daughters, of whom I had three older and three younger, she was without a doubt the dearest to me. So it was with deep relief that I received the news of my older daughters that their father had become impotent with drunkenness and age. But his incapacity for rape did not spare my Celia the harshness of this world. It only made her useless and therefore worthless to him. Worse still, he knew that he had had no part in her conception. She was a symbol, a living reminder of his decline....” _

 

“The Council is meeting today to ‘decide our punishment,’” Buffy informed her husband. “Morrison talked to me about it last night, sort of in code, but I understood well enough. The Inner Council is going to Resend everything,” she went on bitterly, “out of the goodness of their hearts. Then they’re going to draft a resolution telling us both what jerks we are and that _we_ need to shape up.” Giles remained silent. “So while they’re doing that,” she said finally, “I thought maybe we could meet and decide what their punishment should be.”

Giles came as close as he could to sitting up, which was not close. He studied Buffy gravely for a moment. She was anguished and determined. She was mad as hell, in fact, mostly on his behalf. She’d have pulled the world down to it’s foundations for him at that moment if he would but have said the word, and she could do it to. It was tempting, but not very.

“I’ve seen enough of what vengeance can do,” he answered quietly at last. “I have given and received at least my share of punishment in this world. I don’t want ‘justice’; I want peace.”

Buffy said nothing. What was there to say? She tried to take his words at face value. He seemed sincere enough. And he needed her love and support. And it was his mother, not hers. But she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the Watchers were circling the wagons and that there was no place inside that circle for savages like Buffy Summers. Or like Dahlia Harrow.

 

_“We let him take Celia from us. It was the one sin for which we never forgave ourselves. Or each other. We told ourselves that it would be alright. She wasn’t sold away to strangers, after all. When Sarah-Beth married (all in white of course, like the virgin queen) my Celia was among the treasures lavished upon her and her new husband. It was him that sold her two years after that when he ran into a little trouble with his debts. She was thirteen and beautiful. We never again knew where she was, if she was alive or dead. Slowly, we made up our minds, and when we had made them up, we acted swiftly. Not that it did Celia any good of course._

_“We attacked one evening while my mistress was away, helping Sarah-Beth through a difficult pregnancy made more difficult by her marriage to a spendthrift drunk. The plan was to kill Mr. Edwards and to be well into Canada with all of his cash, jewels and other such portable wealth before she returned._

_We probably could have killed her too and had the plantation in the barging. I believe I could have convinced Tommy to do that. But I wanted her to know. I wanted her to come home and find her husband murdered at our hands. Besides, love is not a thing you test if you can help it. You might find that it alters with alteration, far more easily than you expect ….”_

 

An orderly brought Giles a tray and (with a little persuasion) left a second one for Buffy. They began to eat in silence, durable institutional flatware scraping on durable institutional plates. Buffy couldn’t stand it. It was all too much family repeating itself, even if it was by far the less dysfunctional of the two.

“How did you know?” Buffy asked, casually curious, but mainly looking for any topic that he would be interested in enough, even in his current state, to hold up half a conversation, “that Olivia wasn’t Olivia.” Giles looked at Buffy very carefully again, as if surveying a potential minefield. Once again. she felt like a bonehead for not choosing her topic more carefully. Now he probably thought that she was jealous.

“Quintessence,” he said ponderously, evidently deciding that it was safer to answer her than not. “When I was young, I used to tell all of my friends, or anyone who would listen after a couple of drinks, that I thought The Rolling Stones ‘Brown Sugar’ was the quintessence of Rock-n-Roll. I had a whole theory to back that statement up, mind you, all to do with the origins of the music and of American culture more generally, which I’m sure Ethan has heard me explain in detail many times, but of course he never could understand anything a great deal more complicated that figure out what you like and get some.

“At any rate, when he said that, I didn’t know who it was, but I knew damned well it wasn’t Olivia Andwele. Besides the fact that I was never fool enough to have said any such thing to her, she certainly never would have made mention of it, not even in bitterest jest. Olivia doesn’t believe in the idea of ‘race’. When forced to refer to it, she tends to resort to phrases like ‘persons of more predominately African than European ancestry’. And too, she was never a jealous woman, and if she had been would have rather died than admit it. She’d have considered it beneath her her dignity as a feminist. Only someone who’d barely met her would have expected her to say the things that Ethan said the other night.”

“Oh,” Buffy said. She felt somehow slightly insulted relative to the oh so very dignified adult woman he described. But then, she was the bonehead who had asked. Regardless, she felt she had heard enough about the quintessence of Rock-n-Roll and the origins of American culture. Especially from a guy who couldn’t tell a halfback from a wide receiver even if the wind was blowing out of the South-Southeast at 75 miles an hour.

 

_“If I live a thousand years, I will never forget the look in Mr. Edward’s eyes when it dawned on him that his son, his white son, had stabbed him in the chest, that Tommy was the head, the patriarch, of this clan of Negros who were tearing him apart with our knives and sticks and fists. He looked so heartbroken and confused, as if he were suffering some inexplicable betrayal._

_“His confusion only deepened when Mary, his youngest white daughter, entered the room and, despite his desperate warning to run and save herself, walked into the midst of us._

_I handed her the knife I’d been using, and we all stepped back and let her finish him. I do believe that Mr. Edwards died the most perplexed creature on the face of the Earth.”_

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Rereading this, I've noticed how very well my original Chapter Twenty Title doesn't fit this once I've taken out the things that will still show up in Book Three, so I'm changing it to something with a better fitting tone.


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